Each machine within a distributed computing system typically includes a management application that monitors the activities and operating conditions of other applications, services and machines in the distributed computing system. To effectively monitor such activities and operating conditions, the management applications periodically exchange management information with other management applications via management messages. A management message is generated by a management application at an application level (e.g., of the internet control message protocol (ICMP) or the open systems interconnection basic reference model (OSI model)), and includes operating statistics of a machine on which the management application operates and/or applications and services that operate on the machine. Examples of information included in management messages include how long a service has been active, how many users a service has had, the number of services and clients active on a machine, computing power of the machine, the present and past workload of a service, software versions of the service, etc. The exchange of management messages consumes bandwidth of the distributed computing system.